It was a soft and delicious spring morning when I left Aveley--and I have
never had the heart to visit it again. I had had a sleepless night, with
the thought of Father Payne continually in my mind. I saw him in a score of
attitudes, as he loitered in the garden with that look of inexpressible and
tender interest that he had for all that grew out of the
earth--worshipping, I used to think, at the shrine of life--or as he sat
rapt in thought in church, or as he strode beside me along the uplands, or
as he came and went in a hurried abstraction, or as he argued and
discussed, with his great animated smile and his quick little gestures. I
felt how his personality had filled our lives to the brim, as a spring
whose waters fail not. It was not that he was a perfect character, with a
tranquil and effortless superiority, or with a high intellectual tenacity,
or with an unruffled serenity. He was sensitive, impatient, fitful,
prejudiced. He had little constructive capacity, no creative or dramatic
power, no loftiness of tragic emotion. I knew all that; I did not regard
him with a false or uncritical reverence. But he was vital, generous, rich
in zest and joy, heroic, as no other man I had ever known. He had no petty
ambition, no thirst for recognition, no acidity of judgment. He never
sought to impress himself: but his was a large, affectionate, liberal
nature, more responsive to life, more lavish of self, more disinterested
than any human being that had crossed my path. He had never desired to make
disciples--he was not self-confident or self-regarding enough for that. But
he had continued to draw us all with him into a vortex of life, where the
stream ran swiftly, and where it seemed disgraceful to be either listless
or unconcerned. I blessed the kindly fate that had guided me to him, and
had won for me his deep regard. I did not wish to copy or imitate him--he
had infected me with a deep distrust for dependence--I only wished to live
my own life in the same eager spirit. As he had said to me once, the motto
for every man was to be _Amor Fati_--not a reluctant acquiescence, or
a feeble optimism, or a gentle resignation, but a passion for one's own
destiny, a deep desire to make the most and the best out of life, and a
strong purpose to share one's best with all who were journeying at one's
side.
So the night passed, thick with recollections and regrets, deepening into a
horror of loss and darkness, and then slowly brightening into the calm
prelude of a day of farewell. The birds began to chirp and twitter in the
ivy; the thrush uttered her long-drawn notes, sweetly repeated and
sustained in the dusky bushes. That sound was much connected in my mind
with Aveley. To be awakened thus in the summer dawn, to listen awhile to
the delicious sound, to fall asleep again with the thought of the long
pleasant day of work and friendship ahead of me, had been one of my
greatest luxuries.
I rose early, and made my last preparations, and then, having got a little
time before the last meal I was to take with Barthrop, I went round about
the garden with a desire to draw into my spirit for the last time the pure
and happy atmosphere of the place.
I saw the beds fringed with purple polyanthus, and the daffodils in the
dewy grass. I gazed at the long lines of the low hills across the stream,
with the woodland spaces all flushed with spring. I heard the cawing of the
rooks in the soft air, and the bubbling song of the chaffinches filled the
shrubberies.
I knew the mood of old--the mood in which, after a holiday sojourn in some
place which one has learned to love, a happy space of time stained by no
base anxiety, shadowed by no calamity, the call to rejoin the routine of
life makes itself heard half reluctantly, half ardently. The heart at such
moments tries to be grateful without regret, and hopeful without
indifference. The purpose to go, the desire to stay, wrestle together; and
now at the end of the happiest and most fruitful period I had ever known or
was ever, I thought, likely to know, I felt like Jacob wrestling with the
angel till the breaking of the day, and crying out, half in weakness, half
in strength, "I will not let thee go until thou bless me."
It came, the sudden blessing which I desired. It fell like some full warm
shower upon the thirsty earth. In that moment I had the blissful instinct
which had before been but a reasoned conviction, that Father Payne was near
me, with me, about me, enfolding me with a swift tenderness, and yet at the
same time pointing me forward, bidding me clearly and almost, it seemed,
petulantly, to disengage myself from all dependence upon himself or his
example. He had other things to do, I felt with something like a smile,
than to hover over me and haunt my path with tenderness. Such weakness of
sentiment was worthy neither of himself nor of myself. I had all the world
before me, and I was to take my part in it with spirit and even gaiety. To
shrink into the shadow, to live in tearful retrospect--it was not to be
thought of; and I had in that moment a glow of thankful energy which made
light of grief and pain alike. I must take hold of life instantly and with
both hands. I saw it in a sudden flash of light.
I went to the churchyard, I stood for an instant beside the grave, now
turfed over and planted with daffodils. I put aside from my heart, once and
for all, the old wistful instinct which ties the living to the dead. The
poor body that lay there, dust in dust, had no more to do with Father Payne
than the stained candle-socket with the flame that had leapt away upon the
air. That was a moment of true and certain joy; so that when I went back to
the house and joined Barthrop, I felt no longer the uneasy quivering of the
spirit which had long overmastered me. He too was calm and brave; we sat
together for the last time, we talked with an unaffected cheerfulness of
the future. He too, I saw, had experienced the same loosening of the spirit
from its trivial bonds, dear and beautiful as they were, so long as one did
not hug them close.
"I never thought," he said to me at last, "to go light-heartedly away--and
yet I can do even that! I have heard something, I can hardly say what,
which tells me to go forward, not to hanker, not to look back--and which
tells me best of all that it would be almost like treachery to wish the
Father back again. It is better so! I say this," he went on, "not with
resignation, not with a mild desire to make the best of a bad business, but
with a serene certainty that it is not a bad business at all. I cannot tell
where it is gone, the cloud that has oppressed me--but it is gone, and it
will not come back."
"Yes," I said, "I recognise that--I feel it too; our work here is done, and
we have work waiting for us. We shall meet, we shall compare experiences,
we shall love our fate. Life is to be a new quest, not an old worship. That
is to be our loyalty to Father Payne, that we are to believe in life, and
not only to believe in memory."
It was soon over. Barthrop was to go later, and he came out to see me go.
Just before I started, the old clock played its sweet tune; we stood in
silence listening. "That is the best of omens," I said, "to depart with
thanksgiving and the voice of melody." He smiled in my face, we clasped
hands; I drove up the little road, while he stood at the door, smiling and
waving his hand, till I turned into the main road, between the blossoming
hedges, and saw Aveley no more.